Accelerator Grant Winners

They will each receive around $10,000 to bring their projects to the next level

April 17, 2014

Big congratulations to R.U.T.A. and Pulso, the two winners of our Accelerator Grants made possible by a generous support from Alianza CAMMINA, a joint initiative of the AVINA Foundation, the Ford Foundation and the Open Society Foundations. Congratulations also to Immigraphics that was the runner up in our contest

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The two winning teams will each receive around $10,000 to bring their projects to the next level. In addition, R.U.T.A., the project that got the highest score from our judges, has received an invitation to present their app at the International Conference on Open Source Systems to be held in San José, Costa Rica from May 6th to May 9th. We are very grateful to Tony Wasserman, professor of Software Management Practice at Carnegie Mellon University and General Chair of this year’s Conference for making it possible.

The contest was open to the teams based in Central America and Mexico who were global nominees in the Americas Datafest, the first hemispheric hackathon on migration in the Americas held on November 2nd and 3rd of last year in 11 countries and 20 locations, including Harvard and Stanford Universities.

Our wonderful panel of judges did a great job evaluating the projects. We are very grateful for their time and very valuable feedback. These are some of the nice things they said about each of the eight projects that were competing for the grants:

"This is a really nice, original out-of-the-box approach to the problem, and is well-thought-out and well-developed. I'm pretty excited about its potential."

"Finally, a project on github! And I even see some UI mocks in the repo! The webapp so far seems to be in pretty good shape. There isn't too much in the way of documentation, but even just exploring the site semi-randomly and clicking on things I was able to get the site to do stuff. "

"In my opinion, this is by far, the best project in my list. It is very functional, has a lot of potential to impact the lives of many people that lack access to the most basic financial services, and could be used easily. The amount of work accomplished was also quite good."

"You have a good set of services and it is clear that you have thought about it being used in the real world. It is good that you have lined up partner organizations and have thought about testing the system in some detail."

"The website was nice and usable. I can see how this project can have an impact easing the lifes of migrants by providing up to date information on shelters, good and bad routes, and a centralized donation system."